Every guide on writing proposals eventually quotes a close rate. The one you will see most often, 43%, described as the average for freelance proposals and credited to Proposify, is not from either of Proposify's reports and was refuted in the verification pass behind these pages in August 2026. It is a misattribution that has been copied enough times to look like a citation.
What Proposify actually publishes is better than the number attached to its name, and it is worth reading for what it does and does not measure.
The 2024 report
State of Proposals 2024 analysed 1,280,657 proposals sent through Proposify across 27 industries, generating a stated $2,427,531,058 in sales. The average close rate of proposals sent through the platform was 36%. The average value of a closed deal was $13,656. The average time from a buyer first opening a proposal to the deal closing was 51 hours, which the report describes as a little over two days.
The 2024 report also states that the industry average close rate is only twenty per cent, and that a good proposal can double your close rate. Neither line comes with a method, a population, or a source on the page, so this page treats them as the company's claims and not as findings. The 36% is their 2024 measurement of their own users; the twenty per cent is an assertion.
On the sample: the report says the companies varied in size from single-person businesses to enterprise-scale operations, and that personal and competitive information was anonymised before analysis.
The 2026 report
State of Proposals 2026 analysed 742,137 proposals sent through Proposify in 2025, across 30 industries, with a stated total of $3,065,076,804 in sales. The average close rate was 34%. The average value of a won deal was $16,388. The average time from a buyer opening a proposal to closing was 2.5 days.
So between the two reports: a smaller sample, three more industries, a two-point lower close rate, a higher average deal, and a slightly longer window from open to close. None of those movements is large enough to mean much on its own.
Who this measures
People who use Proposify. That is a large group, and it is overwhelmingly businesses with sales processes: proposals produced by teams, sent to procurement, tracked through a pipeline, with an average closed deal in the mid five figures. A single-person business is in the sample, but so is a sales department sending a hundred proposals a quarter, and the averages are dominated by volume.
A freelance illustrator sending eleven proposals a year to eleven small clients is a different population in every respect that matters: deal size, buyer, number of people on each side, how the proposal was produced, and what "closed" even means when the alternative was never a competitor but simply not doing the project. The figures are honest about their own population. It is the guides that borrow them that are not.
Nobody measures freelancers
There is no register of freelance proposals. No platform holds a representative sample of them, because freelancers who use a proposal tool are a self-selected minority, and the rest are sending PDFs from a folder on their desktop. No survey could be trusted, because a freelancer's memory of last year's win rate is not a dataset. So there is no freelance close-rate benchmark, and there cannot be one with the information that exists.
That matters beyond pedantry. An imported pass mark tells you your proposals should be closing at some rate, and when they do not, the problem is presented as you. A freelancer quoting a handful of jobs a quarter has no sample size at all; a run of three losses is not a signal about pricing, and reading it as one is how a bad month turns into a permanent discount.
What a freelancer can measure instead
Three things, all cheap, all more useful than a borrowed percentage.
Your own rate over a year, compared with itself. Not against anyone else's. Log every proposal sent, the option chosen, the outcome, and the days from sending to decision. After twelve months you have a baseline; after twenty-four you can see whether a change in how you price or present moved it.
The window. Proposify's one genuinely transferable finding is that once a document is open, the decision tends to come fast: 51 hours in one report, 2.5 days in the other. Whatever your own number turns out to be, the follow-up cadence most guides recommend (a week, then two) is calibrated to the wrong clock. Better than any cadence is a next conversation booked before the proposal is sent.
Which option gets chosen. If you send three options, the share choosing the middle one over a year tells you whether the tiers are built right. A top option nobody ever picks is a decoy, and buyers can tell.
North records when a client opens a proposal and which option they accepted, so the first two of those are kept for you without a spreadsheet. The judgement about what the pattern means is still yours, and it should be.
Track your own number. Compare it with last year. The 43% figure was refuted; ignore it.
Common questions
- What is a good close rate for a freelance proposal?
- There is no measured benchmark for freelancers, and any page giving you one is guessing. The closest real data is Proposify's: 36% across 1,280,657 proposals in the 2024 report and 34% across 742,137 in the 2026 report, from companies ranging from single-person businesses to enterprises, mostly sales teams. The 2024 report also asserts an industry average of twenty per cent, without stating a method, so treat that line as the company's claim rather than a finding. Track your own rate over a year and compare it with itself.
Sources checked 2026-08-29